A blog for those who desire a deeper walk with Jesus

Monthly Archives: July 2015

There is a popular song currently heard on Christian radio that contains the following lyrics: “Like a bride waiting for her groom we’ll be a church ready for you”. The bride refers to the church as the bride of Christ (taken from Revelation 19:7, 21:2, 21:9), and the lyrics convey the idea that the church is ready to present herself to her Groom, Jesus, for the great wedding feast at the end times.

My friends, the church is not ready for her groom.

When you attend a wedding, you’ll always see the bride carefully adorned for her husband – impeccably groomed, a carefully coiffed hairstyle, a clean beautiful gown, nice shoes, tasteful makeup, and subtly sweet perfume. As the saying goes, all brides are beautiful on their wedding day.

However, let’s say you are invited to a wedding and, as the wedding march is played and you stand to greet the bride, you are astonished at what you see – her hair is unkempt, her gown is torn, her shoes are dirty, her faced is smudged with dirt, and she smells like she just got through mowing the back forty. This bride was definitely not ready to present herself at her best to her husband.

This, I believe, is how the church, the bride of Christ, currently is in America (author’s note: When I talk about the church in this post, I am talking about the church in general, not every single church, as there are some good Biblically based churches that remain uncompromised. However, the majority of churches have left their First Love).

A bride should present herself to her groom well prepared and chaste. And the church as the bride of Christ is anything but prepared and chaste. We have played the harlot with the world by going after other lovers – popularity, political correctness, compromised theology based on our culture instead of God’s absolute truth, lavish buildings, overflowing calendars, big attendance numbers, a non threatening gospel void of the cross and blood of Jesus, hardly a mention of repentance, an easy, breezy discipleship without calls to holiness, surrender, brokenness, or dying to self, and a biblically and theologically illiterate membership that is satisfied with a shallow, inch deep and mile wide relationship with our awesome Savior.

In a seeker and emergent church culture we’ve watered down the truth in order to be relevant and to keep the people happy and coming back. We’ve turned authentic, heartfelt worship into a Hollywood extravaganza meant to entertain attendees. We’ve turned the church into a “latte bar” style lounge so that everyone feels comfortable and “safe”. And we’ve taken the focus off of Jesus and placed it directly on ourselves. In a sense, we’ve amused ourselves to death, and we’ve become so culturally relevant that we, in reality, have become spiritually irreverent.

No, the bride is not chaste, prepared, or ready for her Groom.

The lyrics of the song mentioned above might make us feel warm and fuzzy, but it is far from the truth. Church, we need to get ourselves ready to meet our Groom, and it will not be easy. In fact, it will be downright painful. If we fail to prepare ourselves, God’s judgment on America will have to start inside the walls of His church, with His bride. In Ezekiel 9: 5-6, God commissioned His angel to bring judgment on people who did not follow Him, and then told the angel “Begin at My sanctuary”. These are chilling words, as they show that God’s own people had turned their backs on Him and followed after the world, and His judgment started with them.

You see, God is not shy about bringing judgment on His own. Church in the United States, take note.

The bride of Christ, the church, is supposed to be His tongue, arms, and legs in this world to influence culture with the gospel, and yet, sadly, just the opposite has happened – our evil culture has influenced the church. The influence has been so impactful that the church looks and acts just like the world – divorce, adultery, premarital sex, pornography, lying, cheating, gossip, materialism, self-centeredness, divisions and factions, and in some churches, the acceptance of homosexuality.

The bride has been soiled by the filth of the world and is no longer chaste.

How do we change this? How do we make ourselves beautifully adorned and chaste for our soon coming Groom? The only way is through a genuine revival. And while revival is a sovereign work of God, all revivals in history have come when God’s people fell on their faces in humility and repented of their own sins and the sins of their nation. People were cut to the very core of their souls with their sin and wept in deep anguish over it, not because they got caught or because of the consequences they might face, but because it, in essence, slaps Jesus in the face and offends our Holy God.

When was the last time you, or your church, wept over sin? When was the last time you or people in your church fervently and passionately cried out to God for mercy and, with a sense of urgency called out to Him to bring a revival – first in yourself and then in His church? The results of revival are incredible, but the process is painful. Each of us must come to grips with our own sin – pride, self centeredness, self-righteousness, lust, unforgiving spirits, gossip, jealousy, critical spirits, materialism, idolatry, sexual sin, lying, unwholesome entertainment choices, and lukewarmness. We must come to the point where we honestly and humbly acknowledge these before God and hate our rebellion against a Him, and cry out in repentance. Then we must confess the sins of our nation and cry out to God for mercy. Nothing short of this amongst God’s people will bring a revival.

We desperately need revival, God has done it before and He can do it again. The spiritual condition of our country was pretty deplorable before both the First Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakenings, but God responded to the cries of His people and brought powerful revivals. A Third Great Awakening is our only hope.

A revived church would fall in love with Jesus all over again. A revived church would be characterized by a hunger and thirst for deep intimacy with Jesus, a passion for holiness, an unquenchable desire for the Word, lavish worship, sold out devotion to Him, and a continual attitude of fervent prayer. A revived church would have an incredible impact on its society, and evangelism would come so naturally that scores of people would be saved, and, as a result, marriages would be healed, fractured relationships mended, evil vices stopped, and goodness sought.

But revival must start in the church before its effects are seen in our communities. Church, have we had enough of lazy, compromised, worldly Christianity? Do we want to present ourselves to our Groom chaste and adorned, ready for His return? If so, then our only hope is revival.

We must look at our culture with a sense of urgency. We could be dangerously close to experiencing God’s righteous judgment. Will you pray, with that sense of urgency, for God to send revival our way, And, more importantly, will you pray that He starts this Third Great Awakening with YOU?